Analyzing non-selection rates in user selection mechanisms for sustainable participatory sensing systems

Abstract

Participatory sensing, which enables extensive sensing with low implementation costs, is expected to be utilized in various fields, such as traffic monitoring, infrastructure management, environmental monitoring, and smart cities. Participatory sensing requires users to pay for battery consumption, communication costs, and other costs when sensing. Therefore, the system needs to provide an incentive mechanism that rewards users within the budget they possess to motivate them to actively participate in sensing. While many existing studies discuss incentive mechanisms that select the optimal users within the budget and pay rewards, there is a lack of discussion regarding user departure. Moreover, our previous work considering user departure assumes that users will transfer sensing costs to the system. However, in the real world, the method of users sending sensing costs to the system is difficult to achieve because of privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose an incentive mechanism that considers the user departure by introducing the non-selection rate of users, which represents the proportion of times a user was not selected by the system, to select the optimal users, to maintain the number of users and data quality.